I am working with the Oracle 10.2.0.3 job scheduler on Solaris 10, and unfortunately, the scheduler executes scripts in such a way that several default shell environment variables are not defined. For example, $HOME, $USER, and $LOGNAME are missing.

How can I parse the appropriate record in /etc/passwd into the above variables? For example, when the output from "grep oracle /etc/passwd" is:

oracle:x:100:1978::/usr/oracle:/bin/ksh

I need to parse the information so that I can manually export the following variables:

export HOME=/usr/oracle
export USER=oracle
export LOGNAME=oracle

I'm looking for something generic that will enable me to search for any record in /etc/passwd and parse it properly.

Thanks,

J

export HOME=$(nawk -F":" '/^oracle/{print $(NF-1)}' /etc/passwd)
export USER=$(nawk -F":" '/^oracle/{print $1}' /etc/passwd)
export LOGNAME=$(nawk -F":" '/^oracle/{print $1}' /etc/passwd)

If you know the user name then the only thing you need to look up is the home directory, in ksh this can be evaluated with ~username, eg eval ~\$USER.

This should work:

grep "^oracle:" /etc/passwd | read s
USER=`echo $s | cut -d: -f1`
LOGNAME=$USER
HOME=`echo $s | cut -d: -f6`

This looks interesting. I'll check it out.

Thanks! This works great!

That will only work in ksh. But if that works, so would:
grep "^oracle:" /etc/passwd | IFS=":" read user xpass uid gid gcos home shell